Vol. 73/No. 9      March 9, 2009

President Mahinda Rajapaksa said that a military offensive launched in July has forced a retreat by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE) into a 55-square-mile area north of the city of Mullaitivu.

The offensive has received the implicit backing of Washington and other imperialist powers, along with the government of neighboring India. They have proscribed the Tamil Tigers—as the LTTE is known—saying they are terrorists.

Until the current offensive the LTTE controlled a large swathe of territory in the northeast, where it set up courts and collected taxes.

Sri Lanka is a semicolonial country with an economy based on exports of tea, rubber, and coconuts. Average annual per capita income is $930. Sinhalese speakers number about three-quarters of the population of around 21 million, while some 18 percent, or 4 million people, are described as Tamil-speaking.

The Tamils are divided between Sri Lankan Tamils and Indian Tamils. The latter were originally brought in by the British colonialists to work the giant tea plantations established in the 19th century. Many still work in the tea-growing areas in the south, while Sri Lankan Tamils live mostly in the northeast and in Colombo, the capital.

Sri Lankan Tamils face discrimination and violence fostered by a succession of Sinhalese chauvinist governments. Such regimes have treated the Tamils’ language and the religions they practice as second-class even when officially equal. When it suits them they have organized bloody anti-Tamil pogroms.

The BBC said February 17 that “about 50,000 soldiers are pressing the Tamil Tigers into a patch of northeastern jungle after taking the key areas of Kilinochchi, Elephant Pass and Mullaitivu.” A government ban means that “no independent journalists can reach the conflict zone so claims by either side cannot be independently verified,” the BBC added.

Sri Lankan government officials have announced plans for “welfare villages” to hold some 200,000 Tamils and others forced by the fighting to leave their homes. “Opponents say [they] are little more than concentration camps,” reported the UPI press agency.

The Red Cross and other agencies have criticized the government for refusing to suspend the offensive to allow civilians to escape. Human Rights Watch stated February 20 that about 2,000 civilians have been killed and another 5,000 injured in recent combat.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have accused both the army and the LTTE of firing on civilians who attempt to leave the area.

The offensive is the latest stage in the civil war waged by Sri Lanka’s ruling capitalist parties against the Tamils’ fight for national self-determination—a war that has taken 70,000 lives.

While allying with Sri Lanka in its brutal war, Washington and other imperialist governments accuse the Tigers of pioneering suicide bombings and of carrying out hundreds of such attacks, including the assassinations of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi of India in 1991 and Sri Lankan president Ranasinghe Premadasa in 1993.

In 1995 the government retook Jaffna, Sri Lanka’s second-largest and northernmost city, from LTTE control. A relative stalemate ensued—codified in a 2002 ceasefire—until the government launched a 2006 offensive against the LTTE areas.  
 
 
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